“We think we can continue to grow the business. As we've said, high-single-digits, we can continue to improve the margin and ultimately bring up that AWM, ROE.”

In context

“rst-half of the year would be a little higher exit. And then on top of that, as we've said repeatedly on the call and have given a bunch of information, we're still operating meaningfully below 10-year averages in terms of investment banking activity. And I think that'll come back. I obviously can't predict. But if you look at the returns of the firm, we have materially uplifted the returns of the firm. And we're going to continue to focus on that. Now the next step to the puzzle is our continued progress in AWM. So you know and you can see the performance over the course of the last few years of global banking and markets, but we've said the AWM, ROE is not where it needs to be. You heard our comments about the fact that we've gotten the margin up to 23%, but the ROE is still around 10%. We think we can continue to grow the business. As we've said, high-single-digits, we can continue to improve the margin and ultimately bring up that AWM, ROE. And then you look across the firm and you have a stronger return profile. So I think we're making good progress. We didn't say and have not worked to do for sure. But we feel good about the progress. Mike Mayo: And I assume part of your expectation is a sort of multiplier effect when mergers really kick in. Can you just describe what that multiplier effect could potentially look like based on pass cycles? David Solomon: What I would say is one of the things that should be a tailwind for further momentum in our business is a return to average levels. I'm not sitting here saying we're going to go back to periods of time where we went well above 10-year averages, but there's obviously, if we did get back to that period, and there will be some point in the future where we run above average to”